If reading aloud a children story, you may notice you are able to maintain an independent unrelated train of thought. While doing so, I notice that occasionally extra mistakes can "leak" into the story telling - e.g. you read a single word incorrectly, maybe substituting a word from your other train of thought.
When I was a kid, my dad (a physicist) would often read stories to me and my brother. He would sometimes fall asleep while reading, and we could tell when that was coming because suddenly our children's story would stop making sense and get filled with all these big physics terms.
Somewhat related, but when I was sleep deprived and falling asleep during a general relativity lecture in college, I caught myself reasoning through the series of equations written by the professor on the board, and agreeing as to their validity with the explanation in my mind being that my parents are in a foreign country. My brain was convinced it had logically checked the progression and that it made sense, but it was based on this irrelevant fact. The experience always makes me wonder what falsehoods we individually or collectively use to convince ourselves of things being true.
Oh yeah, I have been sleep deprived so much that the things that I said made no sense. I still formulated sentences but they did not have any meaning. In fact, I noticed this myself and I was like "fuck, what I just said made no sense". This happened a few times. It is a pretty interesting experience.
I had the same experience after almost 4+ days going without sleep. A friend came to check up on me after I fell asleep, I woke up and started telling him a whole story that made no sense, but I said it with such importance that for a week he was asking me to explain to him what I meant...which I don't remember exactly, but it was important.
This sometimes happens to me when I get a migraine.
A sentence can be coherent in the formulaic sense, but complete nonsense as far as words. I immediately notice that it's incorrect, but I don't have the ability to fix it at that moment.
Yes! I immediately noticed that what I said was wrong (even though the word I said still felt somehow connected to the thought I was trying to communicate). I was really worried at first when it happened because at the first time I had no idea sleep deprivation would cause this, or that I would experience it.
I had no idea migraine causes this as well, interesting.
The ability of the brain to do that gives me 15 min of quiet time to think about problems each evening. But you cannot follow the story in that mode, and the whole facade will collapse on a single innocent question...
In school, our teachers made us take turns reading the textbook. When it was my turn, I focused entirely on how my voice sounded, trying to match my cadence and tone to the punctuation. The moment I finished the paragraph, I would have to quickly re-read it in silence just to understand what it actually said.
I think I still can't read a non-trivial text aloud while trying to make sense of it at the same time. I need the two streams just for one text.
I can do that, and i notice that i kinda stop thinking about the reading and put more "brain resources" into the independent train of thought. Then i realize i was reading all the time without putting any effort in it
I am reading dozens of books to my children (mostly of Enid Blyton) and I am able to simultaneously think about something else (work stuff, household, HN subjects etc). It lasts a few minutes during which I don't follow what I am reading and I come back and need to start again. Definitely the phonological loop (eyes...mouth) functions independently from the memory-processing-executive cognitive pathway.
I learned at a young age the best way for me to be a good out-loud reader was to think about something else while I'm reading aloud. If I concentrate on the words and the reading aloud I screw up but if I think about other things, even HOW I'm doing while reading or thinking about what I'm reading and going to say NEXT, then I can read aloud flawlessly.
I can have an internal monologue about something completely unrelated to the story while reading it out aloud, but I won't be able to follow the story. I don't think I make mistakes, but I probably fail to put the correct intonation on sentences which require higher order thinking to infer the emotions of the characters in the story.
Well, perhaps sadly, I maintain trains of thought unrelated to my environment all the time. It's because the default state of the world is so incredibly.. bland I really, really cannot take it without something going on.
The ability may take time to develop. If you have a couple under-5 children handy, who'd love the ritual of having the same ultra-simplistic and repetitive books read to them every night, night after night after night, when your head is probably full of grownup stuff that you gotta get done...
Square root computation can be tricky, often relying on approximations. These approximations tend to perform best for mid-range values, while accuracy can degrade for very large or very small values. With this in mind, a product of roots is generally more accurate than a root of products.
From a SIMD perspective, it’s worth noting that on most platforms, the cost of computing one square root or two is the same. On modern x86 server CPUs, for instance, you can calculate up to 8 double-precision roots in parallel with identical latency. So there’s no additional cost in terms of performance.
I hope this sheds some light on the design of my code.
PS: In a previous life, I did research in Astro- and Plasma Physics. While I don’t claim to remember all the Math, it’s usually more productive to ask for clarification than to assume ignorance ;)
Moments like that are enlightening. When you see something really improbable (knowing advanced SIMD while appearing to ignore basic algebra), it's likely the moment you see a gap in your picture of the world. So it's tine to learn something new and likely unexpected (else you could have guessed).
aka Sinclair ZX81. There was such a program in Your Computer that would toggle between fast and slow mode to generate tones. It was a actually a trivial 8 or 16 step tracker, so you could even make beats...
One cannot assume that an alien can think in a fashion similar to Earth animals.
Humans have the ability to imagine a possibility for which no supporting evidence currently exists--that species alien to our solar system might exist. That ability might not be shared by the species we can imagine. That is, humans can imagine a species that cannot imagine humans. Such aliens would not even realize that building a planet-sized object that cannot be explained by natural processes might present an existential risk.
We, of course, are afraid of hypervelocity impact weaponry, even while having no evidence whatsoever that any such weapon exists anywhere in the universe.
Of course, that just means that any species that did fear annihilation by near-c rocks smashing into their planet would simply disguise their star shade so well that we could not detect it. Meaning that any solar shade we can detect was not likely built by any species able to think like us.
Therefore, instead of hiding, the aliens are going to pro-actively fry every competitor civilization by using their solar shades as a Nicoll Dyson Beam... :-)
